0499 | A Hologram for the King | Dave Eggers
So, I work in Saudi Arabia. For two years, I lived there too. Recently though, I’ve decided life is better across the 20km bridge separating this nation from Bahrain, where…
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0497 | Breakfast at Tiffany’s | Truman Capote
I couldn’t get the film of this little novel out of my mind while reading it. Hepburn brought the character of Holly Golightly to live so vividly that once you’ve…
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0496 | Franny and Zooey | J. D. Salinger
Of course, everyone knows Salinger for Catcher in the Rye, a book I read before this blog began and so never reviewed. That book seemed to be about something. This…
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0485 | Moby Dick | Herman Melville
Moby Dick is one of those books, like War and Peace, that kind of separates the serious reader from the airport novel consumer. It’s not like Proust, which even serious…
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0484 | Wuthering Heights | Emily Brontë
Well this got off to a pretty good start with some excellent characters and plenty of tension between them. And then, about halfway through or even, probably, less than that,…
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0482 | A Boy’s Own Story | Edmund White
This is an important book but it is not an easy one to read. The front cover of my edition had blurb on it that said it combined J D…
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0477 | Emma | Jane Austen
Probably one of the most accessible Austen’s brings my reading of her works to a close. Emma wasn’t too bad actually. Of course, there’s the usual love triangle and convoluted…
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0467 | Life of Christ | Giovanni Papini
By 1921 when this was published, Papini was a man deeply passionate for Christ. This is apparent from the very introduction, let alone throughout the commentary he has written on…
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0458 | Animal’s People | Indra Sinha
Not my cup of tea this at all. Yeah, I love India and have read a ton of books about it. But this just didn’t do it for me. I…
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0457 | How Proust can Change your Life | Alain de Botton
As I’m tackling Proust’s mammoth In Search of Lost Time (ISOLT) this year (and currently over the halfway mark yeah!), when I saw this in a charity shop, I just…
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0447 | A Tale of a Tub | Jonathan Swift
Swift is better known for his later works (Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal in particular) and having read those before turning to this, it’s easy to see why. In fact,…
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0439 | Surfacing | Margaret Atwood
Atwood’s first second (thanks Irina!) published novel sees her get off to a good start with this eerie tale of a woman returning to her childhood home in the Canadian…
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0437 | The Golden Ass | Lucius Apuleius
This Ass is packed with tales that are as full of characters as they are hard to follow. Make sure you get yourself a good translation of this if you…
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0436 | The Child in Time | Ian McEwan
McEwan’s third novel and the earliest that I have read wasn’t too bad. It’s about a guy who is estranged from his wife after the abduction of their child in…
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0430 | Tono-Bungay | H. G. Wells
The last of Wells’ works that was on my tbr list for the 1001 books. Wells occasionally delights me, but, on the whole, though I do regard him a genius…
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0426 | The Sense of an Ending | Julian Barnes
This is a book about time and what it does to us. In particular, it’s about how time gives us a different perspective and how, horrifically, it can bring us…
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0426 | That They May Face the Rising Sun | John McGahern
Now I know what many are going to say on finishing this: ‘what the heck was that about? Where was the story? What was the point?’ And I have to…
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0415 | Henry VIII: King and Court | Alison Weir
There, in a charity shop, completely unblemished as in a proper bookshop, lay Weir’s encylopaedic description of one of the most magnificent courts of English royalty. And it was mine…